Collect your Retrofits: Parametric modelling to support homeowner energy retrofits in heritage buildings at the early design stage

The joint deployment of energy reduction actions across multiple buildings at once is much needed to reach climate targets, but collective decision-making with shared ownership is a complex process. Each homeowner is accountable for their own energy use, while being constrained by their personal financial capacity and will to act with other co...

Consensus-Based Fuzzy Group Decision-Making Framework for Tailoring Good Water Governance to the Context: A Case Study of Sistan, Iran

Although good water governance (GWG) is a widely accepted concept, mistaking its principles for silver bullet approaches has hindered its successful applications. This highlights the idea that one-size-fits-all thinking does not satisfy the need to navigate toward sustainable outcomes in ever-changing complex water systems. This also...

The effect of group decisions in heat transitions: An agent-based approach

The Netherlands aims at reducing natural gas consumption for heating in the housing sector. Although homeowners are responsible for replacing their heating systems and improving dwelling insulation, they are not always able to make individual decisions. Some projects require group decisions within and between buildings. We use an agent-based...

Understanding group behaviour during evacuations inside buildings: An exploratory agent-based modelling approach

Over the last decades, the world population has grown vastly and the percentage of people living in cities has increased. This process of urbanization has had a lot of implications for both safety management and research on evacuations. Due to this growth in urbanization, more high density gatherings are taking place, potentially resulting in...

Belief-Based Best Worst Method

The Best-Worst Method (BWM) is a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method that has recently been introduced. The original BWM assumes that decision-makers are always certain about their judgments even if, in reality, decision-makers often express uncertain preferences. To deal with uncertainty, we introduce a belief structure in the BWM,...

A decision support system for detecting and handling biased decision-makers in multi criteria group decision-making problems

Detecting and handling biased decision-makers in the group decision-making process is overlooked in the literature. This paper aims to develop an anti-biased statistical approach, including extreme, moderate, and soft versions, as a decision support system for group decision-making (GDM) to detect and handle the bias. The extreme version...

Supporting group decision makers to locate temporary relief distribution centres after sudden-onset disasters: A case study of the 2015 Nepal earthquake

In the humanitarian response, multiple decision-makers (DMs) need to collaborate in various problems, such as locating temporary relief distribution centres (RDCs). Several studies have argued that maximising demand coverage, reducing logistics costs and minimising response time are among the critical objectives when locating RDCs after a...

Bottom-up approaches to achieve Pareto optimal agreements in group decision making

In this article, we introduce a new paradigm to achieve Pareto optimality in group decision-making processes: bottom-up approaches to Pareto optimality. It is based on the idea that, while resolving a conflict in a group, individuals may trust some members more than others; thus, they may be willing to cooperate and share more information...

Bayesian best-worst method: A probabilistic group decision making model

The best-worst method (BWM) is a multi-criteria decision-making method which finds the optimal weights of a set of criteria based on the preferences of only one decision-maker (DM) (or evaluator). However, it cannot amalgamate the preferences of multiple decision-makers/evaluators in the so-called group decision-making problem. A typical way...

Interpreting the influencing factors within the decision making process between two train safety systems at ProRail: An explorative study

This thesis explores the decision making process about the implementation of a new train safety system at ProRail. ProRail is responsible for the entire rail infrastructure of the Netherlands and faces tasks such as maintaining, optimising and replacing the infrastructure. One of ProRail’s current projects concerns aged train safety systems and...

An Intelligent Group Decision Support System for Urban Tourists: Development and evaluation of a well-structured group decisionmaking process

When a group decides to plan and organize a vacation, many researchers mention that group decision making within the travel planning problem often leads to suboptimal decisions. This can be explained by the fact that the process of travel group decision making is typically ineffective. To overcome some of the problems, we propose an intelligent...